Min Jin Lee’s
novel Pachinko opens with
this sentence: “History has failed us, but no matter.” While Lee’s emphasis in
the novel is aimed squarely on the “us” in that sentence, I was captivated by
the history she explores, largely because my knowledge of it was sorely
lacking.

Pachinko
begins in Yeongdo, Korea, in 1910, the year the country was annexed by the
Empire of Japan after years of war and intimidation. During the occupation that
followed, Japan took over Korea’s labor and land and waged war on its culture.
Japanese families were given land in Korea, where they chopped down trees by
the millions and planted non-native species. Korean workers were forced to work
in Japan and its other colonies.

Meanwhile,
after seizing treasures of Korean art history and culture, the Japanese
government used them to promote itself as a civilizing and modern force.
Consequently, textbooks, museums, and other icons of learning spread the idea
of Korea as backwards and primitive compared with Japan, a view of the Korean
people that became rooted among Japanese and even among some Koreans.

In
1939, Koreans were pressured by Japanese authorities to change their names to
Japanese names. Since people without Japanese names were not recognized by the
colonial bureaucracy, more than 80 percent of all Koreans complied with the
order.

The plight of the Korean people, particularly the common people, during the occupation, as well as World War II, the Cold War, and the Korean War, inspired Lee to write Pachinko. The novel follows four generations of the same family through the hardships, heartaches, discrimination, and occasional joys of living in Korea and Japan from 1910 until 1989. In an interview included with the paperback edition, Lee says that history often fails to represent everyone because poor and middle-class men and almost all women usually leave no written evidence of their lives. To research Pachinko, she interviewed many Korean-Japanese to gather their oral histories.

As
I read about Lee’s fictional characters, all of whom are interesting and
endearing, I had more questions about the historical events that shaped their
lives. I knew about the dividing of Korea between the Soviet Union and the
United States after World War II, but I wondered why Japan wasn’t divided as
well. Perusing several websites taught me that the Soviet Union didn’t declare
war on Japan until the final weeks of the conflict, whereas the United States
had done most of the fighting there. Also, U.S. President Harry Truman thought
that Japan would be easier to administer if the United States was the only
occupying power.

The
Soviets did receive some parts of the Japanese Empire, however. They were given
the Kuril Islands and Sakhalin Island, which Japan had taken from the Russians
in 1905.

Toward
the end of Pachinko, one of the
characters questions why German-Americans weren’t placed in internment camps in
the United States during World War II as the Japanese-Americans were. Since her
companion doesn’t give her an answer, I was back to the internet to find out. I
learned that German-Americans were interned on an individual basis rather than
as a group. Although the War Department considered removing ethnic Germans and
ethnic Italians from the east and west coasts, it didn’t follow through, mainly
because of the numbers of people involved. According to Wikipedia, a total of
11,507 people of German ancestry were interned during the war, compared with
110,000 to 120,000 Japanese-Americans held in internment camps.

I
would say that Lee reached and exceeded her goal of creating Pachinko to bring attention to the ways common
people lived through this time of catastrophe, including wars, displacements,
changing ideas, and other historic events. Her intimate revelations of her
characters’ lives bring a reality to those events that the usual broad
descriptions can’t. And she sparked a curiosity in me, for which I am grateful.

Sally Whitney is the author of the novel Surface and Shadow, available now from Pen-L Publishing, Amazon.com, and Barnesandnoble.com. Surface and Shadow is the story of a woman who risks her marriage and her husband’s career to find out what really happened in a wealthy man’s suspicious death.